Blab-o-Denise

I’m still flying high from participating in NaNoWriMo, and find myself working on the book almost every day since writing every day feels more like a habit now. To keep it going, I have to continue to: Create a new deadline. My next goal is to have a decent draft for my critique group by March. That means I must organize my scenes, fill in holes, and decide on one of those endings! Make time for writing. To meet my new deadline, writing must continue to be a priority or it gets shoved to the...

NaNo Joy! I feel absolutely exhilarated for so many reasons. My biggest takeaways from this experience was completely obliterating a few beliefs I held about myself as a writer. Belief #1: I’m a slow writer. Wrong! Totally false! I can write like the wind, especially with a little planning. Thank you, Tara Dairman, for echoing this back to me in September and also for providing some solid tools and inspiration to make it happen. With those and the tools I shared Belief #2: I can’t make time to write every day. Wrong!...

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you are enjoying your family and friends today. I’m so thankful for so much–family, friends, and an opportunity to keep writing. Check it out! I surpassed 50,000 words on Saturday, November 19! I am astonished. Shaking my head in utter disbelief. How can this be? And then I kept going. When I compiled it from Scrivener into Word, it was 202 pages. 202 pages in 19 days. What the heck? (see my word count through yesterday below) I will have a final summing up next week, but here...

So, this was an interesting week. It was still a lot of fun, but I definitely had days when I thought to myself: “I don’t feel like writing today.” Even though I had my killer outline and plenty of scenes I could write, I didn’t want to. “Why not?” the voice continued. “You’ve got plenty of words in the bank. You’ll make the 50,000-word goal.” And that was true. But as I’ve mentioned, hitting the word count was only one aspect of my goal. Another aspect was writing every...

Wow. I am having so much fun with this NaNoWriMo thing! Following are some of my observations and experiences. So after hanging to with the gang last Tuesday and doing some timed writing bursts really got me fired up. So I kept going with it, setting my timer and trying to write as fast and as much as I could. Here’s what I discovered: 1,677 words? No problem. This may change, but right now I am easily writing more than the minimum word count, often in under an hour. This is very exciting to me because it...